Story of cities #28: how postwar Warsaw was rebuilt using 18th century paintings

When Warsaw’s Old Town was destroyed by Hitler’s troops in the second world war, the nation mobilised to rebuild the city with the rubble of its own destruction – and the work of Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto

Bernardo Bellotto’s 18th century paintings of Warsaw were used to rebuild the city following its destruction in the second world war.
Photograph: Andrzej Ring, Lech Sandzewicz

It is August 1944 and the Polish resistance are in violent clashes with the Nazi forces that have occupied Warsaw. The resistance intend to liberate the city from what the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz has called the “dark, black and red world of Nazi occupation”.

During the Warsaw Uprising, the ill-equipped Polish resistance succeed in inflicting serious damage on their oppressors, with 20,000 Nazi troops left wounded or dead. But it is the civilian population that suffers the greatest losses, with 150,000 people killed in air strikes and in fighting across the city.

In retaliation, the Nazis raze the Polish capital to the ground. More than 85% of the city’s historic centre is reduced to ruins. Unlike in other European cities, where damage largely occurs during the fighting, Warsaw is systematically destroyed once the two months of conflict have ended, as an act of revenge by Hitler’s forces.

What follows is the story of how Varsovians (residents of Warsaw) reconstructed their city – in part from the cityscapes, or vedute, of the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), often referred to as Canaletto after his more renowned uncle.

Bellotto, who was made court painter to the King of Poland in 1768, created beautiful and accurate paintings of Warsaw’s buildings and squares. It is testimony to the veracity of his work that almost 200 years later, those paintings were used to help transform the historic city centre from wreckage and rubble into what is now a Unesco World Heritage Site.

It was suggested that the remains of the city should be left to memorialise the war, and the entire capital be relocated

In the summer of 1947, the architect Hermann H Field led a small group of American designers to study the post-war reconstruction of Europe. They visited England, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where they surveyed Warsaw, Kraków, Katowice, Wrocław and Szczecin. Their photographs capture what has become a topos of post-war urban ruination: the exposed innards of buildings.

Archive footage from British Pathé shows the buildings in 1950 appearing to fall arbitrarily. Across much of the city, only basements, low walls and the occasional ground floor section of a building remain. The grass lined alleys bring to mind the ruins of Pompeii.

The Varsovians who had not escaped Warsaw lived among the devastation, and would often find corpses buried in the rubble. Early on it was suggested that the remains of the city should be left to memorialise the war, and the entire capital be relocated.

Clouds of dust asphyxiated Warsaw’s inhabitants. According to the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand: “One of the philosophers calculated that Varsovians inhaled four bricks each year at that time. One must love one’s city in order to rebuild it at the cost of one’s own breathing. It is perhaps for this reason that, from the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw ... Varsovians brought it to life, filling its brick body with their own, hot breath.”

From the start of the rebuild, the city’s own rubble was utilised in the reconstruction process, and original fragments of Old Town buildings were recovered.

“Rubble from the former ghetto district was used to produce new bricks for the modern quarter, while architectural details from demolished buildings in the Old Town were put on to the reconstructed facades,” explains Małgorzata Popiołek, an expert in heritage conservation at the Technical University of Berlin.

From the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw

Leopold Tyrmand

While much of this work was done by construction workers and specialised builders, Małgorzata says local people were required to help clear the vast amounts of debris. “The entire nation builds its capital” became the city’s rallying cry.

When the rubble that was to hand would not suffice, more material was imported from neighbouring ruined cities. And to ensure it was all put back in roughly the right place, Bellotto’s cityscapes were used as references for key locations.

Throughout history, the artist’s 22 street scenes have been hotly contested, and removed from Warsaw’s Royal Castle on numerous occasions. Napoleon’s officials took four canvases in 1807; Emperor Nicholas I of Russia seized the whole series in 1832; German authorities did the same in 1939.

By this time, Bellotto’s paintings were especially prized because so many of the works documenting Poland’s history had been blacklisted by the Nazis. (Their blacklist consisted of artworks they believed had to be destroyed in order to implement the “Germanisation” of Poland.)

Bellotto’s paintings, along with the expertise of Polish architects, art historians and conservators, enabled the reconstruction of the Old Town to take place in an impressively short period of time. Most of the work was finished before 1955 – although additional construction continued into the 1980s, and the city is arguably still feeling the impacts of the second world war even now.

The contemporary city is not, however, an entirely accurate recreation of Bellotto’s images. For one, Bellotto used a camera obscura to trace pencil drawings of the architecture, which were then transferred on to the canvas and finished off with watercolours. The use of that optical device has led to some minor inaccuracies.

In Joanna Wiszniewicz’s book Life Cut in Two: Stories of the March Generation, we find evidence of further inaccuracies. Standing on the former ghetto site, one mother cries: “This is not the Warsaw that I remember from childhood. My school stood over there, I played with my friends over there – it does not exist! All of this is so foreign now!”

The word “foreign” acts like a refrain throughout Warsaw’s story – and to this day, the city feels the influence of the communist post-war period. Yet as the curator of the Warsaw Under Construction festival, Tomasz Fudala, showed me, the communist plan for the city was unexpectedly modernist in its attitudes towards light and space.

A painting on an information board in front of a the rebuilt Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. Photograph: Daryl Mersom for the Guardian

A couple of streets down from the Warsaw MoMA, near the site of the former ghetto, there remains a row of buildings that were cut in half by the war. The central courtyards, which we see larger versions of in Neukölln, Berlin, would have been dark and confined.

In response, when Bolesław Bierut was made president of Poland after the second world war, his Six Year Plan for Warsaw – a text full of communist propaganda – tackled the issues of housing and light head on. Numerous diagrams of the city before and after the war show how much more space and light the citizens would have under communist rule.

But two years after this text was published, on 5 March 1953, Stalin died and so many of the gorgeous designs were left unrealised. Pencil drawings of spacious squares lined with sleek cars were consigned to history.

Walking through Old Town today, Varsovians are keen to tell the difficult story of their city. Bellotto’s paintings are reproduced on boards to explain their crucial role in the rebuilding process, and the Visitants’ Church proudly advertises that its organ retains some of the original pipes that were once played by Frédéric Chopin. Everywhere you go there are evocations of Warsaw’s tempestuous past, and of its reconstruction.

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This rich archive of images may one day be used in a similar way to Bellotto’s cityscapes. Certainly, the galvanising call for submissions brings to mind that inclusive Varsovian adage: “The entire nation builds its capital.”

For Warsaw’s reconstruction, though, it was the work of a single artist that provided the crucial blueprint. Without Bellotto’s accurate record of the city, Warsaw would surely look very different today.

Does your city have a little-known story that made a major impact on its development? Please share it in the comments below or on Twitter using #storyofcities

This article was amended on 25 April 2016. An earlier version included an incorrect spelling of the name of Bolesław Bierut.